Learning the Science of Cooperation
On September 20, the Mitchell Center held a workshop on Cooperation Science facilitated by
Tim Waring and Linda Silka, both of the UMaine School of Economics & the Mitchell Center. Twenty faculty and graduate students from a broad array of interdisciplinary fields like Biology and Ecology, Cooperative Extension, and Marine Science attended the three-hour workshop.
Waring introduced the basic principles and central results of cooperation science and drew on examples from Maine and around the world to demonstrate how cooperation often determines sustainability outcomes. The workshop also explored how cooperation dynamics can benefit sustainability research, and how researchers might use cooperation to build new solutions.
Says Waring, “The hardest sustainability challenges we face are ones that require us to cooperate to achieve positive outcomes. That’s why cooperation science is necessary.” For example, he adds, achieving lower environmental impacts usually feels personally costly—buy less, reuse more. “The science of cooperation offers a way to nurture sustainable solutions without feeling such personal cost and isolation.”
Brie Berry, a doctoral student in Anthropology and Environmental Policy, was among the workshop attendees. Central to her work as a member of the Mitchell Center’s Materials Management team is studying social capital as an integral part of materials reuse and the waste reduction.
“Social capital is the networks of trust and reciprocity and relationships that connect people,” Berry explains. “It’s the idea that relationships have value to people and that they give you access to resources and opportunities and can help explain why some people have access to things and others don’t. And you can think about why that would be helpful in terms of cooperation because when you have these relationships it’s easier to work together.”
Berry, who was only vaguely familiar with the topic of cooperation science, thought the way the workshop was structured was very effective using a combination of some of the science and the literature and then a lot of case studies and examples.
“It gave me a lot of different ways to think about what they were talking about—it wasn’t just abstractions,” she says.
Indeed, much of Waring’s recent work with cooperation science involves bringing it down out of the clouds. By making his work more accessible, understandable, and applicable to other faculty and students, they will be better equipped to help increase stakeholder cooperation that can lead to real-world solutions.
Berry also notes that, after Waring stepped through the basics, “breaking into small discussion groups and talking about the connections we saw between cooperation and our own research was really helpful. In my group, we talked about forestry problems and culverts, materials reuse and more, and it helped me think about materials management as a problem where we could use cooperation more effectively.”